Other forms: tensions
Tension is tightness — something pulled hard from both ends and holding. The guy rope on a tent, a violin string tuned up to pitch, a fence wire you can pluck like an instrument.
The same word covers the feeling in a room where two people are not speaking: tensions rose between the two countries, there was tension all through dinner, you could cut the tension with a knife. In a story it is the thing that keeps you turning pages, and in a body it collects in the shoulders and the jaw, which is where a tension headache starts. Knitters and sewers use it in a narrow, exact way — your tension is how tight the stitches come out, and you knit a tension square before anything that has to fit. There is also the tension between two aims that pull against each other, like speed and safety. Note the plural for the political sense: tensions between two sides.
1nounstretchedThe tightness of something stretched, and the pulling force in it.
“Check the tension in the cable before you climb.”
2nountensionAn uneasy, strained feeling between people or in a situation.
“You could feel the tension the moment he walked in.”
3nounsuspenseThe suspense a story or a performance builds.
“The film holds its tension for a full ninety minutes.”
synonyms: suspense
4nounstiffnessTightness in the muscles.
“Most of her tension sits between her shoulder blades.”
synonyms: stiffness
5noungaugeIn knitting and sewing, how tight the stitches come out.
“Knit a tension square before you cast on the sleeve.”
synonyms: gauge
6nounideasA pull between two ideas or aims that cannot both be fully served.
“There is a tension between speed and safety in every one of these decisions.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
tension is a strain.
Tension came into English through Middle French tension, from Latin tensio. The pull has never left it: a rope, a room and a plot all take the same word, because in each of them something is stretched and something might give.
Latin
tēnsiō
Middle French
tension
English, today
tension
Borrowed from Middle French tension, from Latin tēnsiō. Borrowed from Middle French tension, from Latin tensio.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA